Rail-guided ballast tank inspection robot, hardware infrastructure analysis and enhancement

A rail-guided ballast water tank inspection robot from project RoboShip is designed and put together by various companies which resulted in a robot that is still far from efficient and organized. For this project this robot is to be analyzed in order to find improvements concerning electrical hardware. This analysis will contain all the in and outs of every piece of hardware, what kinds of protocols they can be/are using and how much power they consume. The assignment has two main focuses: Firstly, communication between components and secondly the power architecture and a solution for changing batteries. Based on this analysis improvements are made to ensure the hardware is reliable, efficient, well organized and documented.